My Learning Journey

Name: Mara Kleiman

Grade Level(s): 1 & 2

Discipline: Jewish Studies

This I Believe (my 3 Claims):

...children are filled with wonder.
Our job is to teach our students to love learning and be good people.
F.A.I.L.

My May Goal: Stars, Wishes and Wonders...

Begin to create a classroom culture around peer feedback through modeling and practicing.

My Stretch Sketch:

Exploring Elements of Practice

Differentiating and Student owned Chumash text study- creating opportunities for students to learn and demonstrate their learning of the story of Chumash through a variety of modalities.
Documentation & Reflection
- Document: As a "Lead Learner"...
  - What specific shifts are you noticing in your own actions, priorities, language, questions, reflections and conversations that help shape the learning culture for which you strive?
  - I'm taking things very slow, and trying my best to help each student find his or her own personal connection to learning Torah. I had the students use binders to organize their work, and they are now using their binders as a workbook to help them create a timeline of creation, day by day.
- Reflect: Documentation & Reflection
  - What's the relationship? What connections do you see between documentation & reflection in your own learning?
  - Documentation provides one with the necessary data to therefore reflect on one's learning. It saves time and energy, because documenting assures that I'm capturing a variety of student work over a period of time, opposed to trying to remember. The better the documentation, the more meaningful and useful reflection. I'm realizing how much learning happens each day and how easy it is to move on and forget.
- Design 1-2 additional opportunities for students to engage in documentation and reflection of their own learning
  - We had a class meeting. I told the students I wanted them to reflect on their learning. We discussed what that means. We then recalled as a class the variety of learning activities we have experienced to help us learn the story of בראשית, Creation. Here is the list the students came up with: acting, singing, word study, text study, discussion , drawing, technology and timeline project. The students then went on to interview partners using the following questions: what helped you learn the best and why? What was hard for you and why?
  - Reflection video 1
  - Reflection video 2

Student designed learning activities- as a class, we sat around a table and discussed what we thought we should include on the worksheets to help us understand each day of בראשית, Creation. We came up with the following: drawing a picture or writing it, making a word wall with important words, and make a question wall.

Students draw a picture of what the text is saying.
- Students choose a vocab word form the text to put up on our word wall
- Students must answer questions from rubric to describe each day of creation
  - Rubric:
  - Examples:
Questioning
- Creating the wonder wall: Class Discussion: What are some questions that we don't know the answer to? In partners, what questions do you have about the text we learned (creation, bereshit, chapter 1). Do any of these questions not have 1 right answer? If so, it can go on the question wall. Then kids began to throw out there ideas, and for each one, we debated as a class whether it is "appropriate for the question wall". After this initial lesson, they began to understand what "wondering" is about, and we would come back to the wall every several days to reassess. After they felt comfortable as a class, we would come to it less often. Adding to the wonder wall then became one of the consistent "after finished work" options.
- With our wonder wall, we take time, once every few weeks, to look at our question wall, merge similar questions into a broader question, assess whether all questions stay on the wall, and add new questions.
  - successes
    - At this point in the year, the students understand what makes a question "appropriate" for the wonderwall (only a question with no answer or one right answer)
    - Having been working on our wonder wall this whole year, I now hear students articulating "it's not about the right answer", which is one of the underlying goals.
    - Through the act of having students merge multiple questions into a broader question, it truly forces them to discover the essence of what they are wondering- most students are able to throw out ideas of how to broaden the questions
  - challenges
    - When students throw out a question that actually doesn't fit our wonderwall, I don't want to crush there wonder by telling them there is one right answer. How can I address this without crushing their wonder about this topic?
    - For some kids- formulating these "Wonder" questions is just a skill they do not have. As a class, we are succeeding, but I can I help those kids for which wonder doesn't come naturally?
  - wonders
    - At this age, is it more important to teach my kids how to wonder, even if that risks them thinking something I know is not true?